Roommates Rose Monetti, left, and Olga Haines, right, sit in their room on the first floor of Menorah Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing Care on Oct. 23, 2013. 'The saddest part is that all of us, all of us, lost everything," Olga said of the storm. 'All we had was the clothes on our backs.' (Camille Mann/Weather.com)

“The waves were so high ... it felt like you were in the middle of the ocean,” said Lydia Cella, the director of nursing at the Menorah Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing Care in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn.

It was the night of Superstorm Sandy — Monday, October 29, 2012. The night the ocean “came in through the front door.”

(MORE: Superstorm Sandy Then and Now (EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS))

The day before Sandy made landfall, Cella and her nursing staff, along with the rest of the Menorah staff, received word from Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office to “shelter in place,” instead of evacuating the nursing home’s 320 residents, as they did during 2011’s Hurricane Irene.

Instead, first-floor residents were evacuated to the dining rooms on the upper floors — 20 or more beds per room, with beds in rows “like a hospital ward” or army barracks, Menorah resident Olga Haines, 66, said.

“Oh my God, I was so afraid,” Olga said of the evacuation process. “It all happened so fast. It was a nightmare.”

But what happened next would really be some of the most terrifying hours of their lives. When the water finally receded the night of the storm surge, all 80 of the facility’s first-floor residents had lost everything.

Bonder said she was allowed to see her room, just briefly, after it was destroyed. “It’s like, you’re playing with a child: You have Lego blocks, and you build a house, and then just ‘pow!’ you blow it all away. The Lego blocks are there, but they’re just taken apart …” With that, she trailed off and gestured wildly with her hands, indicating a jumbled disaster.

‘Water was shaking the glass, and everything burst’

Over night, the ocean had come up and over the seawall. Stone benches and furniture outside the building floated around the back, crashing through windows.

The water filled the revolving door in the front of the building until the pressure became too much. “We were watching from the lobby — the wall of windows look right out to the ocean,” Florence Fiscian, Menorah’s director of environmental services, said. “Water started coming in everywhere. Water was shaking the glass, and everything burst. ‘Everybody get out!’” she said she screamed to the staff.

More than 100 cars belonging to Menorah staff were swept away or destroyed at that point as well. “The water lifted them up, and they all floated around, crashing into one another,” Fiscian, who had just bought her car six weeks prior, said.

That was around 7 p.m. The water peaked around 8. That night, around 11 p.m., the staff began to smell fire and see smoke snake up the stairwells and into some hallways. Some panicked, believing the building had caught on fire.

“The smell was coming from Breezy Point,” Nancy Sondag, the director of therapeutic recreation said. Breezy Point burned that night: Nearly 130 homes were destroyed. It ranks as one of the worst residential fires in New York City history, according to the New York Times.

“That was the scariest thing for me: To look out the window, and see Breezy Point up in flames,” Sondag recalled. Smoke was coming in because the first floor doors were destroyed, allowing the smoke to come up the stairs.

The most horrible experience of the night for Fiscian was when Menorah itself almost burned. The large electric trash compactor in the back of the building was submerged, and the wiring caught on fire. “I came out to check on things and saw smoke. The water was bubbling,” Fiscian said. “Mr. Ramos [the facility electrician] had to run through the water to go shut off the fuse.”

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Shortly thereafter, they had to cut the generator power to prevent a fire. With the facility dark, National Guard air crews passed them over, thinking they’d evacuated, Cella said. They were on their own.

As Mother Nature destroyed the building’s first floor, upstairs, residents were calm. Sondag had a musician playing to soothe them. “I hate to say this, but it reminded me of the Titanic,” Fiscian said. “There was so much turmoil around us, and there was somebody playing music.”

Cella said residents were amazingly quiet and unaware of the troubles downstairs. “Throughout the course of the night, I was just praying that the water would stop rising,” she said. “I kept running downstairs to see how far the water had come up into the stairwell. It was really covering everything — we were surrounded by water. Finally, around 9 or 10 o’clock, somebody said the water was receding, and I said, ‘Oh thank God, we’ll be okay now.’”

The day after the storm

The next morning, staff surveyed the destruction. There were whole patios and decks from Breezy Point and the nearby neighborhood that had been swept away from their original homes to Menorah’s front entrance. “There were deck chairs and tables chained to the deck, so they wouldn’t blow away,” Fiscian said. “But instead, the water washed the whole deck away. One patio even had an ice box chained to it that was still there.”

There were TVs scattered around, too. One perfectly balanced on the sea wall. Two giant boulders now rest permanently in front of the building, carried there during the storm.

Mostly, the staff just remembers the debris: mud, leaves, sticks, everywhere inside the building and covering the space between the front door and the ocean. The lights had been ripped from the ceiling, and wires were dangling into what was once the lobby. Shattered glass covered the area, so that when family members of residents and staff flocked to the building to check on their loved ones, no one was allowed inside. “It was too dangerous,” Sondag said.

Three days later, 37 of the first floor residents were evacuated to a newly constructed hospice facility in the Bronx, also owned by the same non-profit company, MJHS, formerly known as the Metropolitan Jewish Health System. That evacuation process seems to have been the worst part for Olga, Rose and other residents — they really didn’t know what was happening during the storm itself.

“It was horrible — I was so frightened,” Olga said of being carried down four flights of stairs by aides, in order to evacuate the building. “I closed my eyes,” Rose added, “I felt ready to fall off [of the chair].”

Residents stayed in the Bronx for a month, when they were returned to makeshift rooms in Menorah’s former dining rooms until May, when the first floor was reopened for business.

Olga is sad over her lost belongings, but she raves over how she was treated in the Bronx facility and during the storm itself. She had nothing but the clothes on her back, and she was very well looked after, she said.

What if it happens again?

“We were prepared, but I don’t think anybody imagined this,” Sondag said. Still, just a few days after the storm, the front area had been mostly cleaned up and repairs on the building had begun. (In some ways the MJHS lucked out — one of Menorah’s buildings was already being renovated, so a construction crew was already in place on site. Since the storm, the crew has adopted some of the floating deck and patio furniture as its own, storing their new-found extra seating outside of their construction trailer.)

All told, the facility weathered around $20 million in damage, if you include the total cost to repair the seawall, said Jay Gormley, the MJHS’s vice president of planning, research and innovation.

Superstorm Sandy also hit MJHS’s Shorefront Center for Rehab on nearby Coney Island. But that building was constructed on stilts and was much more suited to weather a disaster, Gormley said. A sand dune did flood the inside, but cleanup was relatively painless.

The company is still processing insurance claims for Menorah. It is set to receive some money from FEMA as well, Gormley said. It’s also received an outpouring of charitable donations, from groups such as the United Jewish Appeal and from individuals, including some of the company’s own employees, whose philanthropy and dedication has been inspiring, Gormley said.

“We’re focusing on putting things back smarter, doing some mitigation in such a way that recovery will be easier if this happens again,” he said. Part of the mitigation strategy includes rebuilding with flood-resistant materials.

In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, a lot of people are taking a look at disaster mitigation plans for nursing facilities.

It’s a process that’s really been ongoing since 2005’s Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Nicolas Castle, Ph.D., a public health researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in aging populations, told Weather.com. Castle ran a 2008 study that looked at the evacuation plans of nursing homes across the country, which found that quite a few facilities were ill-prepared for natural disasters.

In some New York nursing homes during Superstorm Sandy, administrators were confused about whether they should evacuate and then where patients should be sent, according to numerous reports from the Associated Press. “Some sat for hours aboard unmoving ambulances as the drivers waited for orders, only to be taken to the wrong place. Some facilities accepting evacuees wound up overloaded with more patients than they were prepared to handle. With the phones knocked out, relatives struggled to learn where loved ones had been taken,” David B. Caruso wrote for the AP in February.

These issues highlight the problems with widespread evacuation, Castle said. “New York City has some 250 nursing homes,” Castle said. “How do you get all those folks out? How far out do you take them? How quickly can you realistically do that?” Nursing home residents cannot be on buses of hours on end, he said. “There’s what’s called relocation stress: It’s very stressful for them to be moving.” During Katrina, one bus of nursing home residents caught on fire on the highway, killing some. Some that remained in facilities ultimately died, Castle said. “There’s no easy answer.”

Sondag agreed. “Around here, there are so many nursing homes, and we’re all in the same situation,” she explained. “When it comes to evacuation time, every nursing home wants or needs the same transportation. I believe that’s why the mayor said shelter in place. If it happens again — they’ve increased the flood zones, there are more people [who will have] to evacuate.”

Since the storm, some safety changes have been made. All the nursing facilities along the New York coastline have satellite phones in an attempt to prevent Sandy’s communication issues in the future.

There’s also a new statewide alert system that sends automated phone messages to family members of nursing home residents, and a system called E-Find that gives each nursing home resident a band with an ID number. During an evacuation, the bands can be scanned to determine where the patient came from. “A lot of residents were replaced during the storm,” Cella said, though none from Menorah.

“I think the industry is moving in the right direction as far as evacuation and safety goes,” Castle said. “The catalyst for this was Katrina. Regulation existed, but no one was really looking at [the guidelines]. There’s been a push to do a lot better than we did, and I think in large part, we have.”

Even though they know they are prepared to deal with a massive storm surge like the one that came that night, the Menorah staff and residents remain frightened. Olga said she’s afraid it will happen again. “I never wanted to relieve this,” Fiscian said. “I never wanted to go through it again.”

The storm wasn’t all bad. It bonded the staff and residents together, Belle said. “This is my family, this is my home,” she said. The woman on the bed next to her during the storm — though they don’t even speak the same language — is now an irreplaceable special friend. And that’s what matters, she believes, not her “magnificent” jewelry collection, no matter how much she misses it.

“[After the storm], I thought, ‘how am I going to replace all this stuff?’” and then I thought, ‘Oh, the hell with it. I’m okay. The people I know are okay,” Bonder said. “I get to keep knowing all the people I knew before.”

“We’re still here,” echoed Rose. “And I thank God every day.”

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